and that's what i'm doing for now for more on the stories we covered go to r.t. dot com slash usa also check out our youtube page youtube dot com last r.t. america i'm christine for zero will be back in an hour and a half. a charmer here broadcasting live from washington d.c. coming up today on the big picture. world for. you the latest in science and technology from around.

the few jerks covered. this is the kaiser report yeah you know the folks on wall street and around the

world the banking industry love a good disaster is amazing they can issue trillions more bonds and pocket themselves billions more fees let's get some more details from stacy herbert max the first headline we see the true heart of disaster capitalist larry kudlow the values human life with the japan earthquake slick the human toll here it looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that and the human toll is a tragedy we know that but these markets are so all these markets right stocks commodities oil gold there is no major breakout or breakdown is the traders telling us what is very much a part of this is because oil is moving lower they feel as though this is good news for the u.s. larry kudlow and sandy say are genocidal maniacs they would love to put people in them burn them for a profit if they had a chance they would take us much public larry kudlow. these are. despicable

vile something gross part of your show larry kudlow did apologize via tweet saying i misspoke let's look at the true heart of our global financial and economic system and all the remaining headlines here saudi troops arrived in bahrain to suppress protests the saudi intervention came two days after u.s. defense secretary robert gates visited. and held talks with the king in which he said he urged them for undertake rapid and significant reform now robert gates also visited cairo when we were there and soon after all there appeared again but i don't get is america spends what a trillion and a half two trillion a year on military take more than half the tax take and spend it on military toys they occupy countries all over the world they send unmanned drones into pakistan afghanistan iraq kill civilians left and right. they've got a clear target in tripoli one unmanned drone take them out but they say no we have

to equivocate on this we need to deliberate on this so is it just as tony blair would suggest you only lift a finger to do anything in this world if you get a big payout from the oil industry and that's it shameless well there is a huge you know interconnected financial link between libya and europe so perhaps that's why he's not doing that but in bahrain the saudi troops came and the day after the largest protest in bahrain in which they shut down the financial district so that is always very important to whether or not for intervention arrives people are waking up to the fact that the terrorists are the bankers and unless you take the bankers out of the out of the picture you're going to be living in a ghetto now you have often mentioned the digital economy and the role of the internet in these revolutions happening throughout the arab world these are the controversial satellite photos that set off protests in bahrain so these are from

google earth and bahrain's oppressed and overcrowded shiite majority began using google earth to view palaces and other states that make up ninety five percent of the country as these images churned up discontent the government blocked google earth but as you can see from these images here this is a p.d.f. that was created from the images that they captured before the bahrain government basically bans google earth from bahrain but you can see that the shape majority is forced into the little five percent of this already tiny oil rich kingdom you know . the transparency that comes with the proliferation of the internet and social media has given people the fortitude in the vision to effect regime changes and rightly so and if you look at these images again you'll see that they highlight the golf courses yachts. horse tracks these are all that while palaces the many royal

palaces throughout the country in the ninety five percent of the land that the royal family occupies they also highlight you know these big palaces they often ask how did he get it because according to the constitution of bahrain the the resources of the nation are the ownership of the state the state owns the resources the people own the resources but it looks like from google earth that it exposes the lie that in fact a small family occupies an owns ninety five percent of the wealth of the nation so we have these royalty of these oligarchs around the world controlling ninety five percent of the wealth of most nations or thereabouts close to it. and the peasants fight amongst each other for the little scrabble heaps of it and in fact in bahrain you have the shits are split in half one half is negotiating with their monarchy and the other half isn't you know this brings us to america wisconsin firefighter spark move your money moment. so on the date of the bill passed their wisconsin

assembly effectively ending fifty years of collective bargaining in wisconsin hundreds of firefighters walked across the street from the wisconsin capitol and stood outside the marshall is leave bank m. and i bank and one by one they close their accounts and withdrew their life savings totaling approximately one hundred ninety thousand dollars so these hundreds of firemen and one hundred ninety thousand dollars now the bank itself why they were targeting banks is this bank is one of the biggest backers of scott walker the governor and the bank received two billion dollars in tarp funds they have not paid this back the bank is about to be sold off to canada into which of course . in this transaction something will happen that they'll never have to pay back the u.s. money laundering so this is why they protested this bank of course well it's the sound of one hand clapping in other words we're going to move your money it's going to take your money out you've got to do something with it you just can't put it

into another corrupt bank you've got to buy silver bullion whether this is the only way to crash the banking system because there are over leveraging their silver shorts they've sold so or they don't know if you take physical silver off the market you crash the banks principally the biggest financial terror of the world or j.p. morgan but then when i poked into this obviously they've done a deal with tarp they took billions they gave back nothing they're leeching from the community and the people who are trying to work a decent living in the area are rightfully insurrection go forth from this article is a very bizarre little fact put in here i remember the peasants are tearing each other apart half of the peasants and in wisconsin are against the peasant workers in the public sector unions the firefighters the policemen and the nurses and the teachers there against them a tunnel in the am and i parking garage links to the capitol basement dubbed the rat hole to the walker palace the tunnel always used by governor scott walker to fair. every lobbyist into the capitol building to hear is budget address well the

capitol building was shut down so this bank has a secret tunnel that goes directly into the capitol building a private corporation has a direct link into the capitol building where they don't have to go mix with the riff raff and who knows and lobbyists are being funneled in and out and yet the people are out there fighting each other the peasants are fighting each other enough fighting to stop this corrupt system without a little bit let me get this straight the persons are in this in the street fighting each other and meanwhile there's a total there's an underground tunnel from the bank to the capitol building that's correct this is what this article says so they're just they're just doing the money laundering and they're going they're going running in there in their almost criminal activity through an underground tunnel between the bank and the capitol building in the prisons around squabbling with each other both pure union you're not you know public union you're not a part of the union. of these persons waiting for and then you know the half of the

peasants are fighting on the side of the monarch's and all the guards well in the bill that was just passed the governor may sell any state owned heating cooling and power plant or may contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant with or without solicitation of bids for any amount that the department determines to be in the best interest of the state so going back to bahrain where ninety five percent of the the assets are held by one small family now this guy could sell to koch industries for example energy industry company they could sell it to them for any price they deem is a good a good guy a good sell a good deal for the state it's also so it was there is work wisconsin bahrain or dublin ireland of course they just got a new deal with their new government where they would start selling pieces off of that country so their creditors for no reason other than to make a few. rich so it's against

a corporate architecture and people are revolting against the corporate. but the so far they have no scalps they have no wins there is a better regime change except in tunisia and egypt those are the only two successful regime changes we've seen in the global insurrection against banker occupation we haven't seen anything in europe yet you know portugal looks good ireland looks good greece looks good i think one of those countries should get a regime change soon in the u.s. you've got the states scott walker is a mubarak of the of the midwest i mean you should be replaced immediately just going around the capitol building stand out there with a pitchfork and whatever and just wait until the guy comes up but max he's just one of these presents he's a peasant that's how they operate they take they divide and conquer the peasants they give him one hundred thousand a year who knows how much he makes and then we can feel him poor and david koch calls and even if it's a fake david koch and he feels like an important guy and he'll squash and destroy there's a lot of peasants out there that's fire fighters out there i'm saying need to get some wins though ok overthrow. scott walker and then move to the koch brothers

then move to new york fed then move to the fed in washington get some wins on the scoreboard get some points on the scoreboard because very ballots present zero monarch's or hundred points they got all the points presence of go up and speaking of winning charlie sheen secret silver investor a person writing under the name charlie sheen the disgraced sitcom actor they call him follow the comment with the commodity futures trading commission last week and he recommended the agency adopt a more conservative position limits on derivatives tied to silver it's not as though silver bugs already a crew prone to conspiracy theories about speculators and market manipulation needed more reasons to worry but in charlie sheen's march first memo the writer asked to see f.t.c. to readjust its proposed position limits and silver sheen says that the current formula would result in a position limit of over five thousand contracts for any single speculator the.

memo writer said that the limit is equivalent to twenty five million ounces of silver only three mining companies worldwide produce that much silver each year crushin is right charlie sheen is part of the server liberation army charlie sheen is supporting the new world disorder charlie sheen is welcome on those show i'll be more than happy to have us my guest to discuss these and other topics. i reached out to his people through my people i haven't heard back yet but it's early in the call ok well stacy ever thanks so much for being on the kaiser report thank you monks when i come back i'll be talking with michael betancourt all about a really interesting variation on the thing of capitalism don't go away.

the official. called touch from the. video. feeds.

i welcome back to the kaiser it for time now to talk with artist media historian and critical theorist michael betancourt who writes about the did. it'll economy michael welcome the kaiser report thank you i'm glad to be here all right michael you have corn into the phrase ag no to logic capitalism what is it it's the idea that we're now living in a capitalist state this is at least partially supported by misinformation systematic this information and a kind of. general confusion of what is fact and what is not what's physically real but is immaterial ok so when people talk about the efficient market theory for example the prices reflect all known information using your thought process and we

should be talking about the inefficient market theory that prices have to incorporate this agnel to a logical model which is correct me if i'm wrong but it's the the study of misinformation it's how misinformation is pushed into the system as a quantity unto itself correct it's actually a little bit more than that it's not just the pushing of the user formation into the system it's the specific construction of misinformation in order to deceive the system in order to drive say markets in order to make decisions that would not otherwise be me to confuse the ability to make these decisions ok how does this differ from let's say propaganda propaganda it is not true when we're talking of black propaganda that's propaganda created to deceive i have no tolerance he doesn't set out to create this information it sets out to create balance about what

is known and it does this by following the standard procedures and simply arriving at different results usually because it begins with a different set of assumptions or takes other values into account this sounds an awful lot like what we saw during the one nine hundred fifty s. and sixty's when the cigarette companies are trying to push this idea that actually cigarette smoking with healthy i mean is not an example of this that's actually where the term was originally created by professor proctor. he was studying how cigarette companies raised confusion about the nature and the risk of their products and so that's where this entire framework originates in is since expanded in much the same way that everything tends to expand it. so now we see not just cigarettes but the risks associated with almost any product we could choose or any commercial or frangible investment that we might encounter there's a certain degree of this involved in this presentation all right let's move on to

the digital economy and digital capitalism something you write about a lot what what attracts you to this topic what is the listen on some of the highlights here what attracted me to it is the fact that so much of our economy seems to be digital now digital has infected let's say if we want to think that as a contagion infected most of our culture and the initial approach to this that i was interested in was the question of digital rights management and how digital rights management seem to be a necessary evolution whether we want it or not whether we like it or not a necessary evolution of how digital technology has functioned as we've had it since the one nine hundred eighty s. when the first commercially available digital commodities became available and so i was asking that question any poll there is in the course of doing the thinking and the research into something that i call the aura of the digital now this concept is

kind of cornish is because we find it absolutely everywhere the idea of the or of the digital is simply that. when we deal with something that is digital or reveal something that could be digital the first thing that happens is we forget to think about the physical costs and the physical supports and all of the material things that go along with having a digital connection we don't think about the internet backbone the hardware the supports the end of it we don't really think about the costs of maintaining that what we only think about is oh look i can click on this thing here i can download whatever this digital thing is it derives it's beautiful because it's just as good as all of the other digital copies and so it doesn't seem to cost anything but there are very real costs in there and the or of the digital serves to mask those what happens is this are of digital is not just concerned with cultural products it's actually something that expands throughout our culture and has literally

expanded since the one nine hundred eighty s. so we get something like the housing bubble and it just burst in the last few years and the new possible bubbles in say you know civil bonds or government bonds or treasuries depending on who you want to listen to and all of these potential bubbles and the ones that have already burst like the housing bubble or the dot com bubble it's a savings and loan bubble these bubbles are reflections of how there's a rupture between the immaterial concerns of the r. of the digital which it describes and the kind of paradoxes that it describes let me walk through an example of that that's i've got this at night my my brain here as somebody is let's say creating a digital farm on farmville within the game by face broad and have a digital barn and they use a digital currency they're immersed in the digital space and they tend to take that digital or a thinking and apply it to their actual house and they fail to see that their

actual house has real cost involved in that house and i think you also make a connection to labor and how labor as. as pet fit into that equation well the problem here is that when we shift to a digital capitalism following on this kind of pervasive expansion of the r. of the digital where we shift from a material physical capitalism one that's based on actual production and wages and labor and all of that to an immaterial on the danger and this is what i think it's happened is that we've had this transfer from this digital realm into the less then digital realms such as the financial markets in the form of financialization because financialization at a kind of basic level is a reshuffling of immaterial commodities and if you take say the gold index and you generate a commodity based on selling futures based on gold and exploit it in the physical

gold so you end up making money based on something else that may not actually be connected to something physical and actually there's another kind of exponential shift here where you take it a step further and you start chopping up what are here at it we tie to physical commodities and credit default obligations for instance like mortgages and you securitize things and then you securitize your securitized investments and you chop all of this up into very very tiny traction and then you sell these trenches as bundled things and you make money not based on the objects that they're connected to but on the chopping up resembling reassembly and selling which is fundamentally a semiotic procedure a matter of language you're manipulating signs that is the immaterial dimension of immaterial capitalism and when that happens you've essentially removed labor from your market if you automate your market with high frequency traders that follow

algorithms and you eliminate all of the human elements to this or you minimize them as much as possible which is what has happened then you have this fully autonomous out of mated immaterial version of capitalism and it generates values through circulation rather than. true the actual sale is something that is scandal dishes course why we get collapses right and you need some accreditation from institutional players in all this for example the federal reserve bank other investment banks rating agencies and all these players and the government has to give these things the seal of approval and give them an a rating or an a plus rating even though what they're exchanging back and forth is a fan phantasmagorical representations of a digital cross as a derivative of something that was a con consummation and somebody is imagination over lunch before they went out for a couple of martinis and they call that a deal they give themselves a huge fifty but at the end of the day they're just programming the computers to

steal is not correct yeah i wouldn't necessarily say steal why not but i don't because for a title higher frequency trading is a siphon cycling capital on the floor of the exchange for no work as you point out it's fully automated they put in no labor they steal the money out of not stealing the reason it's not stealing is that everyone involved is profiting from this process the idea of how do people in america who are having their currency in the based because of the stealing that's going on by goldman sachs and j.p. morgan by using high frequency trading in the foreign exchange how come they are not participating in this because they're getting penalized by that there are victims of their three s. i just don't think that the stealing is necessarily the right erk for us it's something else. stealing it all is that there is some kind of physical commodity that's being stolen the currency is being debased implies that if we didn't do this the currency would be sold it and the whole problem here is the to currency itself

is disconnected from any kind of physical value it exists as a debt against future production rather than a store of value and this all of this comes back to the immaterial basis that we're not living it so yes it is since you could say that they're stealing in a greater sense they're not really stealing because there's nothing to be stolen right so the people who are victimized by this they should take solace in the fact that when it all started they weren't worth anything to begin with basically yes i know that sounds terribly perverse the reality is that this is an unsustainable system and that the inevitability of its collapse has been there almost from the beginning because the entire system is based on a currency that is not based on anything it exists only in relation to other currencies insulters semiotic let me just cut in here the perversion of this is obvious to those who can see how these machinations work and what that was perverse about it is that people who are out there in the streets in wisconsin fighting for

a few crumbs from the table don't understand that what they're fighting is an illusory model that doesn't even exist that they are screwed and they're scrambling for virtual crumbs essentially they're even understand how how perverse the system is they don't even have a comprehension of how far away they are from the nexus of the capital producing mechanism in the they larceny the digital arsing that's going on that's perverse yes it is and we won't miss it even more perverse is that what they're fighting for is the continuation both basically their entrapment yes this really perverse part of this is that the. the powers that are currently acting and that are causing these riots protests rebellions whatever you want to call them they're basically fighting for their own survival and we shift that's happening

is curse because we're driving towards a collapse and it's almost inevitable that we're going to have to scale absolute guinn at some point and to a certain extent i think it may have already started with the credit freeze in two thousand and nine and the attempts to basically crittur a way out of the problem isn't going to result in hyperinflation necessarily oh there are people who are saying that it will so much as it's going to result in a completely valuation system in which we arrive at some other new equilibrium and part of the problem to getting there is that there are forces that are. more or less fighting over who has the largest number of these essentially immaterial objects this immaterial currency and what will happen is at some point they will have most of it and we're moving towards that already if you look at any of the various numbers in terms of who has the wealth and he doesn't what will happen when it gets concentrated enough is the entire system itself will simply freeze up like it did in two thousand and nine and that's because the equilibrium and the

maintenance and the survival of the system depends upon the secular nation of these are maturing commodities as soon as they start getting hoarded verses people who have them start cashing out and into some kind of physical commodity both of these can trigger an imminent collapse not in the sense of necessarily a bank run or a panic but in the sense that the system kendell longer easily be able to maintain its own equilibrium and as it drives towards ever greater disequilibrium because that's needed that's the ground state for the start of a situation where you have vast immaterial production versus limited physical production michael betancourt thanks for being on the kaiser report thank you i was glad to be here already and that's going to do after this edition of the kaiser report with me max kaiser and stacy herbert i want to thank my guest michael betancourt if you want to send me an e-mail please this out at kaiser reporting r t v dot ru until next time this is max kaiser sang.